WarpedNaba posted:

http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/12/17/lftr-in-australia/

'allo allo, this 'ere's an interesting one.

Barnsy posted:

HOLY poo poo.

Why haven't more people heard of this???

He makes an epic case for thorium plants. Even the coal companies would be happy...

WarpedNaba posted:

http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/12/17/lftr-in-australia/

'allo allo, this 'ere's an interesting one.

quote:

There have been seventy thousand operational nuclear devices constructed since 1945, and not one from thorium. Yes, it is so difficult that out of the ten countries with nuclear arsenals (USA, USSR/Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, South Africa and North Korea), none have bothered.

Kafka Esq. posted:

This is a really depressing look at Greenland ice melt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9euZ6q4bEKs

Squalid posted:

There are several good articles on nuclear energy here:

http://www.theoildrum.com/search/apachesolr_search/nuclear

Which all have sources and are generally written by professional scientists or engineers. You could start with this article for a broad overview.

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5631

deptstoremook posted:

And, an interesting point, even if all electric energy were supplied by nuclear tomorrow, that would still only account for a relatively small portion of our consumption.

computer parts posted:

Consumption of what, fossil fuels? Because another big chunk (transportation) can be pretty easily switched over to electricity which can then be supplied by Nuclear Power.

deptstoremook posted:

Well now you're going even further into speculative territory. Even if we overcome the very real limitations of uranium production and the construction and deployment of new plants which Cellier describes, now you're proposing that--in the same short span of time--the world's transportation systems could be "pretty easily" converted to electric. If the political will for nuclear plants is already scarce, by what means do you suggest we implement an unprecedented, speedy, and unilateral overhaul of all of our existing means of transportation?

deptstoremook posted:

Well now you're going even further into speculative territory. Even if we overcome the very real limitations of uranium production and the construction and deployment of new plants which Cellier describes, now you're proposing that--in the same short span of time--the world's transportation systems could be "pretty easily" converted to electric. If the political will for nuclear plants is already scarce, by what means do you suggest we implement an unprecedented, speedy, and unilateral overhaul of all of our existing means of transportation?

deptstoremook posted:

SInce the nuclear chat is still going on, I want to thank Squalid for bringing this series of articles to my attention. It's not a quick read, but it very clearly and deliberately lays out the misinformation and wishful thinking that permeates pro-nuclear advocates, and I was especially happy that he dedicated so much time to the often-overlooked issue of mining fissile material, particularly in the quantities and consistency needed for long-term sustenance and growth of nuclear as a power source. I always felt that I lacked the evidence to argue convincingly against nuclear as a worthwhile replacement for fossil fuels, but Cellier makes a pretty convincing case that we at least need to be honest with ourselves about (a) the feasibility of uranium mining, (b) the construction and regulatory delays for new reactors, and (c) the problems with banking on "future technology." And, an interesting point, even if all electric energy were supplied by nuclear tomorrow, that would still only account for a relatively small portion of our consumption.

More philosophically, I worry that to rest our hopes on things like nuclear power is to miss the deeper point in the environmental crisis. We are in this situation because of the outsized consumption of energy and obsession with material production and wealth that has metastasized since the Industrial Revolution. To replace coal and oil with nuclear would doubtless help with global climate change--however, it does nothing to address (and in fact only submerges) the core issue, which is that our cultural practices (broadly construed) are simply unsustainable. Nuclear power could in fact do more harm than good--it may only palliate global climate change, which is a symptom of the underlying disease, global industrial capitalism and all its attendant issues. I haven't heard a great rebuttal to this idea, but would welcome conversation.

blowfish posted:

e: regarding societal changes: I wish we would do this along the lines of "nuclear reactors for the people, comrade" rather then pure pork politics: nucular edition, but even the latter would be a step forward.

deptstoremook posted:

SInce the nuclear chat is still going on, I want to thank Squalid for bringing this series of articles to my attention. It's not a quick read, but it very clearly and deliberately lays out the misinformation and wishful thinking that permeates pro-nuclear advocates, and I was especially happy that he dedicated so much time to the often-overlooked issue of mining fissile material, particularly in the quantities and consistency needed for long-term sustenance and growth of nuclear as a power source. I always felt that I lacked the evidence to argue convincingly against nuclear as a worthwhile replacement for fossil fuels, but Cellier makes a pretty convincing case that we at least need to be honest with ourselves about (a) the feasibility of uranium mining, (b) the construction and regulatory delays for new reactors, and (c) the problems with banking on "future technology." And, an interesting point, even if all electric energy were supplied by nuclear tomorrow, that would still only account for a relatively small portion of our consumption.

More philosophically, I worry that to rest our hopes on things like nuclear power is to miss the deeper point in the environmental crisis. We are in this situation because of the outsized consumption of energy and obsession with material production and wealth that has metastasized since the Industrial Revolution. To replace coal and oil with nuclear would doubtless help with global climate change--however, it does nothing to address (and in fact only submerges) the core issue, which is that our cultural practices (broadly construed) are simply unsustainable. Nuclear power could in fact do more harm than good--it may only palliate global climate change, which is a symptom of the underlying disease, global industrial capitalism and all its attendant issues. I haven't heard a great rebuttal to this idea, but would welcome conversation.

baka kaba posted:

A lot of things would be a hell of a lot easier within a more socialist society, since these issues require national and global planning and investment. If our goals were about solving problems and putting people and resources to use where they'd be the most helpful, for the wider social good, we'd be able to make a hell of a lot more progress in evaluating new technologies and fixing the whole loving problem (as well as all the other problems that tend to fall hardest on the developing world).

Instead we're more focused on protecting profits and the self-interest of the companies who get them, and believe that the glorious free market will produce a solution and shower us with the benefits... any time now. It's hard to really imagine how we're going to make any of the changes necessary when so much power is in the hands of private entities who are more interested in entrenching their own positions and destroying anything that threatens them, whether it's technology or policy or even awareness that there's even a real problem.

Barnsy posted:

Also, expecting people to revert to previous standards with less energy use is simply never going to happen. Especially when 3rd world countries come of age (hello China/Africa), energy demand is going to be huge.

The Erland posted:

I think electric cars are an interesting case that illustrates one of the most important choices in environmental policy and activism. I live in Norway, which is the country in the world with largest electric car use per capita. There are three reasons for this:
1. We're one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
2. Much lower sales tax on electric cars than on other cars.
3. Electric cars get free parking and don't have to pay toll roads in a lot of places. Also, they get to use the bus/taxi-lanes.

Now, this does seem like a positive development. However, the SSB (Norwegian central bureau of statistics) has pretty conclusively shown that as an environmental policy, the reduction of sales tax is an extremely expensive way of fighting climate change. This holds true even if you consider that norwegian electricity is very clean, being based mostly on hydroelectric power. The report can be found here, in english: http://ssb.no/forside/_attachment/115044?_ts=13ed6241100

Now, the question is: Do we keep doing this? Some would argue that the benefit of the tax breaks resists primarily in the long term change of society in a more environmentally friendly directly direction. If viewed this way, the point is that these subsidies slowly are making the electric car competetive in the norwegian market by encouraging charging points and other infrastructure. A simple analysis of CO2 savings is therefore not a good measure of how effective the policy is. To use the terminology of the norwegian green party, it's about getting on the "green track."

On the other hand, some would say that huge subsidies of electric cars are just the kind of feel good environmentalism that has negligible effect on actually stopping global warming. And honestly, dollar for dollar, changing from oil to gas or investing in CO2 storage probably has a bigger effect. But is this just threading water while we allow society to go on just as before?

blowfish posted:

Gas is still bad. As in, still terribly bad because we don't need to cut CO2 emissions by like 50%, but by like 90%.
Of course, if you're using carbon neutral electricity to get Hydrogen or whatever, it's fine. I'd even argue it's superior to battery powered electric cars because rare earths are, uh, rare and you probably won't be able to power all the world's cars and ships with lithium ion batteries for long.

With regards to getting on the green track... cutting CO2 emissions as quickly as possible is what we should be focusing on. If we manage to do that, a large part of our sustainability problems is taken care of for the foreseeable future (i.e. centuries) and we have breathing room to worry about (and spend money on) everything else.

e: Regarding electric car subsidies: we'll have to do it one way or the other soon (via better batteries or via electricity->fuel conversion), so while it's not exactly low hanging fruit I'm cautiously pro-subsidies and would generally support funding R&D for both options though I think it's going to be the latter.

Also, "green" living at a standard of living close to current first world levels will probably be more energy intensive rather than less so since that would mean replacing lots of area intensive low energy farming with energy intensive low area farming (i.e. vertical farming) and replacing fossil fuels with electricity or synthetic fuel (with substantial losses of energy when converting water to hydrogen/CO2 to fuel, since thermodynamics is a bitch).

Claverjoe posted:

Ships would probably be nuclear powered. I mean, it's not like we don't have nuclear powered ships puttering around right now, it's that they are all military. Smaller ships are a bit of an open question though. May be that there will be a lower bound for ship size. Cars would be *much* fewer in number if a switch to electric happened. Hopefully somebody could do a decent zinc/air rechargeable battery, which would obviate the concerns about rarity of materials.

Paper Mac posted:

Or, you know, sails.

Barnsy posted:

80% of French power is from nuclear. So no, it doesn't necessarily account for a small part of consumption. Also, I think most people that are pro-nuclear completely agree that it's not a solution to stop climate change, but it is the best stopgap measure until people realise they need to get off their asses and do something.

baka kaba posted:

Whatever happens, big changes need to be made, and the political will for public investment is generally scarce either way. It's not really related to nuclear power

Protagorean posted:

I think deptstoremook is also missing the rather critical point that fossil fuels, in sharp contrast to nuclear power options (current, feasible, and futuristic), are literally making the planet uninhabitable as you read this post.

blowfish posted:

* We can build Integral Fast Reactors (the Uranium fueled equivalent of LFTR, can burn nuclear waste so well that it's less radioactive than natural uranium ore in 300 years rather than in a couple ten thousand years ). In fact, the UK is considering one to burn nuclear waste left over from weapons production. Almost everything necessary to run one has already been run in Argonne National Lab like thirty years ago - not exactly future tech
* We need a few times (2-3 if I recall correctly) the electricity to actually run transportation on electricity instead of oil. That's a tall order if you want to ditch both coal and nuclear. When choosing between those two, nuclear power wins hands down.

quote:

Philosophically speaking / how do I want the world to look like:
I am arguing with the assumption that globalisation is awesome, cheap transportation is great and the ability to casually use or even waste electricity is not bad in and of itself, especially when there's few consequences like with nuclear power. I am also not assuming best case scenarios for population growth (stable population soon, maybe even decline to less unsustainable levels), but continued growth for the foreseable future.

[To] help third world countries - keeping in mind my previous statement - I will absolutely prefer a solution that enables a standard of living in the general ball park of current first world countries rather then being stingy with resources and dragging both into some southernmost-landlocked-Chinese-province standard of living (I've been there and, uh, gently caress no).

deptstoremook posted:

Thanks, Protagorean, for that thoughtful post. You're right, I missed the memo on fossil fuels. I also must have missed the part dictating that all discussion of energy must be prefaced by a binary choice between fossil fuels and nuclear power!

Paper Mac posted:

Or, you know, sails.

blowfish posted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails

Obviously you still need a regular screw propeller backup to maintain consistent shipping times if there's little wind for a couple of days in any case.

Sogol posted:

Hapag-Lloyd, Maersk, Cargill are already beginning to deploy sky sales, reduce cruising speed by 50%, use heat exchangers and beginning to create ISO standards for fuel cells.

deptstoremook posted:

You're right, I missed the memo on fossil fuels. I also must have missed the part dictating that all discussion of energy must be prefaced by a binary choice between fossil fuels and nuclear power!

quote:

Pro-nuclear people love to argue from the position that it's impossible to get people to reduce their energy consumption, that renewables are a pipe dream, but the idea of getting the whole world on board, holding hands, and building X nuclear reactors per year is just as pie-in-the-sky. Not only do the nuclear countries do everything they can to regulate and prevent the construction of plants elsewhere, but with the exception of a couple highly affluent and atypical European states, even the nuclear countries are unable to muster the will to build new plants!
I'll be straigthforward. You can't be an environmentalist and think "globalisation is awesome." This has gone straight from wishful thinking to harmful delusion. Your advocacy for nuclear energy must be blinding you to the hundred other problems with globalization: global capitalist hegemony, an obsession with short-term-profit, and the endless production of disposable, inefficient "luxury" goods, all built on the backs of the world's poor. Those are environmental justice issues, all. On a purely ecological front, globalization amplifies every issue this thread goes over: global warming, overfishing, overhunting, deforestation, soil depletion, mining, chemical pollution, fracking, destruction of natural habitat, and so forth.

Your Sledgehammer posted:

You are missing or outright ignoring deptstoremook's central point, which is that the level of resource consumption and energy use is the fundamental problem that is driving all of the environmental problems we face, and it will persist even if we go full nuclear. Most folks who are willing to take ecology seriously concede from the get-go that consumerism must end regardless of what path we choose. If you think we can maintain our current levels of resource consumption and energy usage without facing a major environmental crisis in the next century or two, you are nearly as delusional as the folks in ExxonMobil or the Republican Party who think that our fossil fuel use is just fine and dandy.

Your Sledgehammer posted:

You are missing or outright ignoring deptstoremook's central point, which is that the level of resource consumption and energy use is the fundamental problem that is driving all of the environmental problems we face, and it will persist even if we go full nuclear. Most folks who are willing to take ecology seriously concede from the get-go that consumerism must end regardless of what path we choose. If you think we can maintain our current levels of resource consumption and energy usage without facing a major environmental crisis in the next century or two, you are nearly as delusional as the folks in ExxonMobil or the Republican Party who think that our fossil fuel use is just fine and dandy.

Your Sledgehammer posted:

You are missing or outright ignoring deptstoremook's central point, which is that the level of resource consumption and energy use is the fundamental problem that is driving all of the environmental problems we face, and it will persist even if we go full n

Nevvy Z posted:

How exactly will all environmental problems continue if we go full nuclear?

quote:

We can explore more exactly the thermodynamic limits to the problem. Earth absorbs abundant energy from the sun—far in excess of our current societal enterprise. The Earth gets rid of its energy by radiating into space, mostly at infrared wavelengths. No other paths are available for heat disposal. The absorption and emission are in near-perfect balance, in fact. If they were not, Earth would slowly heat up or cool down. Indeed, we have diminished the ability of infrared radiation to escape, leading to global warming. Even so, we are still in balance to within less than the 1% level. Because radiated power scales as the fourth power of temperature (when expressed in absolute terms, like Kelvin), we can compute the equilibrium temperature of Earth’s surface given additional loading from societal enterprise.

quote:

Earth surface temperature given steady 2.3% energy growth, assuming some source other than sunlight is employed to provide our energy needs and that its use transpires on the surface of the planet. Even a dream source like fusion makes for unbearable conditions in a few hundred years if growth continues. Note that the vertical scale is logarithmic.

The result is shown above. From before, we know that if we confine ourselves to the Earth’s surface, we exhaust solar potential in 400 years. In order to continue energy growth beyond this time, we would need to abandon renewables—virtually all of which derive from the sun—for nuclear fission/fusion. But the thermodynamic analysis says we’re toasted anyway.

Nevvy Z posted:

How exactly will all environmental problems continue if we go full nuclear?

enbot posted:

It seems like you are just looking for reasons to hate nuclear because of your beliefs about capitalism rather than actually making honest comparisons between the available ways to generate massive amounts of energy.

Nuclear energy is like airplanes- people commonly overestimate the risk of things that have big one time events and underestimate the risk of more common but smaller impact events. You can go on and about the dangers of nuclear energy but coal mining alone kills untold thousands per year and the burning of it kills over ten thousand people per year in the US alone. I'm sure in places like china those numbers reach hundreds of thousands. Total number of deaths, including indirect, for nuclear energy is something like less than 10,000 since it has been invented.

Paul MaudDib posted:

It's a lot longer-term issue, but eventually energy dissipation will become a component in global warming as well. Even assuming that we stop adding greenhouse gasses, all the energy we generate eventually ends up in the atmosphere as waste heat too. If you generate one joule of energy, eventually you end up with one joule of heat, and vacuum is a really good insulator.

Even if we assume that we come up with cold fusion tomorrow, we do need to stop the growth of our energy usage, or within a few centuries our planet will be uninhabitable simply from our own waste heat. And actually if we did come up with cold fusion Jevon's paradox states that we would probably overheat our planet even faster due to the cheap "externality-less" energy.


The result is shown above. From before, we know that if we confine ourselves to the Earth’s surface, we exhaust solar potential in 400 years. In order to continue energy growth beyond this time, we would need to abandon renewables—virtually all of which derive from the sun—for nuclear fission/fusion. But the thermodynamic analysis says we’re toasted anyway.

quote:

This analysis is an easy target for criticism, given the tunnel-vision of its premise. I would enjoy shredding it myself. Chiefly, continued energy growth will likely be unnecessary if the human population stabilizes. At least the 2.9% energy growth rate we have experienced should ease off as the world saturates with people.

deptstoremook posted:

To the posters who realize the complexity of the issue, and still advocate for nuclear power, you need to understand that it will do precisely nothing to resolve the underlying issues in our society. To present nuclear energy as a panacea or even a contingent solution is intellectually bankrupt and does a great deal of harm to the movement.

In short: the only practicable solution to the environmental crisis even approaching "long-term" is an extreme reduction in the consumption of energy and manufactured goods. Enbot, you can talk all you want about my "beliefs about capitalism," but reduced consumption is the sine qua non of environmental advocacy, if we hope to survive.

deptstoremook posted: